news
Programming Leftovers
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Anton Zhiyanov ☛ High-precision date/time in C
If you work with date and time in C, you might find vaqt useful.
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Michael's and Christian's blog ☛ Introducing LightSHAP
LightSHAP is here – a new, lightweight SHAP implementation for tabular data. While heavily inspired from the famous shap package, it has no dependency on it. LightSHAP simplifies working with dataframes (pandas, polars) and categorical data.
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Java/Golang
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Stefan Marr ☛ Can We Know Whether a Profiler is Accurate?
We could try to look at the code and estimate how long each bit takes, and then painstakingly compute what an accurate profile would be. Unfortunately, with the complexity of today’s processors and language runtimes, this would require a cycle-accurate simulator that needs to model everything, from the processor’s pipeline, over the cache hierarchy, to memory and storage. While there are simulators that do this kind of thing, they are generally too slow to simulate a full JVM with JIT compilation for any interesting program within a practical amount of time. This means that simulation is currently impractical, and it is impractical to determine what a ground truth would be.
So, what other approaches might there be to determine whether a profile is accurate?
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Daniel Lemire ☛ Speed of random number generators in Go
We often need to generate random numbers in software. We need them for games, simulations, testing, and so forth. In many of these cases, we would like to use the fastest generator we can find, as long as it is reasonably random-looking. In some instances, we need them for cryptography: we may need to generate a number that nobody else could guess. In these cases, performance is less of a concern.
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